“Billions died in less than 24 hours.”

Most zombie stories begin the same way. Take a random, ordinary day; add a mysterious plague that kills a great percentage of the population; focus on a handful of survivors as they seek each other out and come to terms with the fact that their loved ones are now flesh-eating undead. I really don’t see the need for re-writing the classic Night of the Living Dead gig, unless there’s a new (or at least interesting) twist to it. Like 28 Days Later, where the never-identified-as-zombies “Infected” have a very different sort of affliction, and even Shaun of the Dead with its comic twist. Autumn, sadly, offers nothing new or exciting in its story.

True to the genre formula, the book begins with an ordinary autumn day turned gruesome, as people begin to asphyxiate and literally drop dead, leaving very few survivors. By the end of the next day, half of the bodies “wake up” and start walking around aimlessly. And then they start reacting to sound and light… And then they start attacking the living... Not really all that suspenseful if you’ve ever seen a zombie flick.

But that’s ok, that’s what makes it a horror story. Author David Moody (if he - a horror writer - was actually born with that last name, it would be a crazy coincidence) still has a chance to wow me with his writing skills and characterization. We can look into the human condition; we can sympathize with the characters and bite our nails when it looks like they have no way out. We can be mentally transported to the cottage in which the survivors huddle and feel part of the story. At the very least, since it is a horror story after all, we can be supremely grossed out.

Or not.

Moody’s writing is disappointingly amateurish and repetitive (if I read the phrase “unexpected and inexplicable” one more time, I would have slammed my head into a wall). His descriptions are flat and the characters are mind-numbingly dull. We skim the surface of them – age, sex, occupation – but never delve into what they are feeling. Their interactions mainly consist of: “What should we do?” “I don’t know,” and, “Are you ok?” “Yes, are you ok?” I think the zombies could have had more interesting conversation!

The overall lack of suspense made the entire story seem anticlimactic. Nothing, truly nothing, happens. Even the undead are boring. They don’t eat a single brain in the entire book. Everyone knows zombies eat brains! I believe the closest we get is reading how one man is “swallowed up by the crowd” or something similarly un-detailed and not-interesting. Yawn.

Maybe the story gains momentum in one of the four sequels Moody penned for Autumn, but I’ll never know, because I won’t be reading them.